Giulio Rosati - The Carpet Merchant

Watercolour on paper, 55 x 38 cm

Signed lower right: ‘G. Rosati Roma’.

Signed lower right: ‘G. Rosati Roma’.

Giulio Rosati is an exponent of that generation of Roman painters who had established themselves internationally in the last thirty years of the 19th century for their virtuoso use of watercolour in the wake of Mariano Fortuny's lesson and thanks to the mediation of the influential dealer Adolphe Goupil. Common traits were the bright and vivid colours, the choice of genre subjects in costume, the attention to detail and the sometimes considerable size of the medium. Also skilfully painted are the details of this work depicting a carpet merchant presenting his wares to two patrons, a man with his head covered by a coloured shemagh stopped by a yellow and blue agal and his waist marked by a lively sash and a veiled woman dressed in odalisque trousers, against the background of an Arab town with traditional low houses. The author lingers over the carpet and the details of the clothes from the precious embroidery to the buttons that close the man's tunic, rendered in bright colours that contrast with the more muted tones of the background. An undisputed specialist in the Orientalist genre, alongside which eighteenth-century costume themes appear more rarely in his production, Rosati depicts an Arab world populated by proud Berber knights and comely odalisques.

Recurring are the market theme, which allows for a display of skill in the description of merchandise, and the harem richly furnished with meticulously drawn carpets. It is an Arab world recreated with grace and elegance in tune with the success that the mysterious and wild Orient had encountered since the beginning of the century thanks to the masters of French romanticism, from Eugène Delacroix to Horace Vernet and Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres. The rich harvest of photographs, images and objects available through the numerous study trips made by western explorers freed the genre from any romantic tension during the second half of the 19th century to make way for the documentation of customs and daily life by travelling artists such as Jean-Léon Gérôme, John Frederich Lewis, Alberto Pasini and Cesare Biseo. The great fortune of the genre, but also the immense iconographic heritage, allowed the orientalists active between the 19th and 20th century to bring back to life in the studio an Orient never visited personally, just as the contemporary Emilio Salgari recounted an exotic and distant world based exclusively on travellers' descriptions and reports, in a continuous balance between documentation and fairytale narration, free of excessively realistic elements.

Teresa Sacchi Lodispoto